We are proud to announce that Contre Jour, a collaboration between the Internet Explorer team and Mokus Games, has been named Best of Show at the SXSW Interactive awards. On a night celebrating the very best in digital technology, Contre Jour was selected as the judges’ overall favorite project. Contre Jour, which also took home the award for the Amusement category, showcases the incredible possibilities of IE10, multi-touch and HTML5.

Contre Jour started as an iOS game earning multiple accolades, including the 2011 “iPad Game of the Year” and a 2012 Webby award nomination for “Best Tablet Game.” Bringing Contre Jour to the web has resulted in arguably the most ambitious use of HTML5 to date. Coupled with the entirely new IE10 browsing experience, the game play of Contre Jour on the web is simply stunning. It is as fast and fluid as many native apps, and with IE10 and Windows 8, it is perfect for touch. Once you start playing in IE10 on Windows 8, you immediately forget you’re on a website.

Perfect for Touch: Contre Jour with IE10 really helps paint a picture of what is possible when it comes to the future of touch on the web. IE10 not only provides a browser UI that is perfect for touch — dedicating 100% of the pixels to the site with a full-screen chromeless UI — but provides developers a new set of multi-touch capabilities that change what is possible on the web. In fact, Contre Jour is the first game brought to the web that actually requires multi-touch on particular levels. These kind of multi-touch experiences have typically been limited to apps, but with IE10 and its extensive touch support, the team has been able to deliver an elaborate and engaging game that requires users to get hands on to complete levels.

New worlds anda truly ambitious use of HTML5: The visuals are stunning, and the math behind making all these features come alive is intense. With hundreds of active elements on the screen at any point in time, the level of interactivity is pretty unprecedented. Unlike other games, the elements in Contre Jour are not simply made up of images or sprites—most of the elements in the game are drawn dynamically using just math and physics on an HTML5 canvas. To display all these elements, it uses four or more canvases in tandem—where most websites only use one at a time. Only hardware accelerated browsers like IE10 can stitch these canvases together to create the fast and fluid experience you would expect when playing a game like Contre Jour.

And just when we thought this couldn’t get better, it did. We launched 2 new worlds of the game right around Valentine’s Day. The New Friend World is a sweet treat for players, featuring beautiful new sunset themed levels that provide a beautiful background to Petit’s love story. These levels are exclusive to the Web and introduce a brand new character to join Petit, named Amie. Amie, French for “friend,” is a fluffy, vibrant and energetic partner-in-crime to Petit, and flies through the levels helping Petit on his journey to find his true love, The Rose.

Like Contre Jour, sites like the newly released Vyclone, Pulse and Atari are part of our continuing efforts to showcase what is possible on the web today, and how touch and IE 10 are changing the way users interact with the web. We had a great time building this game, and encourage you to check it out.